Report: Steelers shockingly will not trade Antonio Brown to the Patriots

It’s a good thing the Pittsburgh Steelers won their Super Bowl back around Christmas, cause as we all know, it is hard to keep a championship-caliber team together. The salary cap hits, the contracts, the targets, and the BIG personalities, they all really up the difficulty level on keeping your Super Bowl window open. At least the Steelers will always have the memories, right?

Antonio Brown, of course, pushed all his chips into the middle of the table and splashed the pot on Tuesday trying to force his way out of Pittsburgh, and like our fearless leader Bernd pointed out right after the news broke, if the Steelers cave and end up shipping him out, they massively FUBAR their salary cap with at least $21.2 million in dead cap space. Never mind losing the guy who’s done THIS as a sixth-round pick that’s basically Danny Amendola-sized:

As far as even a snowball’s chance of AB ending up in New England, though, it took all of, like, an afternoon for that to get shot down. After Evan Silva floated all the ideas on why Brown would most likely run a clinic in New England, Jason La Canfora hopped in immediately like “Yeah, they may have a Jersey Shore situation down there, but they’re not THAT dumb”:

You gotta chuckle about what it says about the rest of the league when we’re actually surprised a team has learned that trading with Bill may actually come back and bite you later on.

On the other hand, this doesn’t rule out one I-just-threw-up-in-my-mouth possibility: the New York Jets. They’re sitting on roughly $100 million in cap space (not a typo), and they’ve already been theorized as a possible landing spot for fellow cranky Pittsburghian Le’Veon Bell, and it’s also hard to imagine the Steelers seeing New York as a serious playoff threat anytime soon.

In the meantime, we get to sit back and enjoy the show.

[UPDATE] The Steelers have reportedly agreed to trade Brown but, yeah, he’s not coming to Foxboro.